Night Weather – Fall, Weeks 10 and 11: Moon and Train

Katie Nordt LaRosa, 2014

x
the train rumbling
across the overpass
shakes down dust
on my upturned face

xi
grieving the loss
of something I did not have
crescent moon

The tiny figure in the landscape pauses on the hillside to watch the train pass. The crescent moon rides low in the night sky. The passenger train is taking people to a different place, maybe a better one. No need to be stuck in Folsom Prison to envy those who are moving on down the line, “eating in a fancy dining car / ... drinking coffee and smoking big cigars.” Plodding along in our own lives, we can admire how, as Emily Dickinson wrote, the train “lap[s] the miles, / And lick[s] the valleys up.”

*****

cold night
distant train
the lazy dog barks from bed

the sound of a train
over long steel rails
clickety cogito clackety sum

*****

The Lake Is a Bowl of Fire
Over the lake, the moon crouches, its tongue lapping the water.
A boat drifts, spotting the surface with a single beam.
The longer you wait, the fisherman knows, the longer you have to.
The world spills into lake and puddle, and still there's more.

In a house on the bank, a girl is dying. Mother has become
a beast of prayer, pacing like a panther in its cage. 
She is counting the moon’s slow steps when she hears a train
whistle through the crossing. When day comes, let time stop. 

Her girl’s dying will leave another hole in the world.
The moon will set in the lake, the boat slide from the water,
the fisherman turn and squint at the rising sun. The more
you look, the less you see. The lake is a bowl of fire.
     Mouth Work, 2016; Visions International, Fall 2012

*****

sunset
mockingbird's wing
carries the moon

moon
spreading its white hair
across the pond
—inspired by J.P. Seaton’s translation of Li Po (Li Bai) “At Ch'iu-pu Lake”

rivers not yet flowing
glow in the stillness
of moons not yet risen 

​Cynthia Reeves, “November’s Cutting Edge,” mid-1960s. The lake is a bowl of fire. 

dipping oars
in the moonlit water
far from home

*****
​
The Send-off
by Wilfred Owen

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

​Written April–May 1918, Ripon. Poems (1920). John Bayley notes the poem’s universality: it ‘seems both to contain and transcend all the muted terrors to which this century has since accustomed us – trains of deportees, hidden outrage, guilt, the desire not to know’ (Spectator, 4 October 1963). Source: Dominic Hibberd, The Winter of the World: Poems of the Great War (Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.) 

*****

May the Lord bless [the] land…

with the best the sun brings forth
     and the finest the moon can yield….

—Deuteronomy 33:13 - 14

Posted 24 November 2024